Miranda Devine
–,
Wednesday,
July,
29,
2015,(8:11am)

AT the very least, Margaret Cunneen, SC, is owed a public apology from ICAC commissioner Megan Latham.

Cunneen, her son Stephen and his girlfriend Sophia Tilley, have emerged unscathed from ICAC’s unaccountable and secretive star chamber.

But only after a tortuous year in which they had their homes raided, their phones seized, were dragged before secret hearings and threatened with jail. And only because Cunnen had the legal nous to fight back.

“This could happen to anyone,” she says.

“If this could happen to me in relation to some interaction that was thought to have happened with police, then it can happen to any citizen and any family and that’s why I have to speak up.

“I’m fortunate I know a bit about the law and I know hundreds, if not thousands of lawyers, many who have been of assistance to me but, if this happened to any other family without those resources, they’d just have to cop it.”

And all this pain was for what? An unsourced allegation, that Cunneen had told Sophia to fake chest pains after a car accident so she wouldn’t be breathalysed by police on the scene.

Cunnen denies the allegation. The fact that Sophia was taken by ambulance straight to hospital, and returned a blood alcohol test of 0.0, makes the triviality of the case even more perplexing.

But ICAC took Cunneen all the way to the High Court seemingly hell-bent on destroying her over a flimsy case that had nothing to do with corruption or had any relevance to her job as a public servant.

What is scary is that we can see now that ICAC pursued Cunneen with no evidence that could withstand scrutiny, and no jurisdiction to begin with.

Even when the High Court humiliatingly ruled that it had exceeded its powers, ICAC upped the ante, referring Cunneen to the DPP to consider criminal charges and issuing an extraordinarily intemperate and lengthy press release, claiming it had “information by a Federal law enforcement agency that indicated the commission of an attempt to pervert the course of justice by Ms Cunneen”.

Well, that ruse ended when the Solicitor General last week announced that an independent investigation of ICAC’s brief by Victoria’s Chief Crown Prosecutor found there was no grounds for prosecution.

“Whatever the suggestion was about this great piece of evidence they had, obviously was found to have no cogency or substance whatsoever by the solicitor general or the Victorian silk who examined it,” says Cunneen.

“The stupid thing about this is it was all so unnecessary.”

Cunneen is “well out of pocket” for legal fees. She says she doesn’t believe in litigation for herself, though her son and his girlfriend will seek advice about suing ICAC.

But the consequences for ICAC have to be serious. It has to be brought to account, and Friday’s report by former High Court chief justice Murray Gleeson, QC, and Bruce McClintock, SC, ought to give the government ammunition.

The greatest benefit to the taxpayer for ICAC’s $30million annual budget is that its mere presence serves as a deterrent to corruption in public office, but now that its own reputation has been tarnished, and it has proved vulnerable to legal challenge, that illusion has evaporated.

ICAC has become Frankenstein’s monster, with immense powers that no one knows how to control. Designed to do good, instead it has become a weapon of state thuggery.

Cunneen should never have been in its sights. She has done more than almost any other public servant to ensure that the state’s worst murderers and rapists are brought to justice.

This is what her detractors in the legal profession don’t understand; the reason for her popularity with the public is not because she has friends in the media.

It is because, over a career spanning almost 40 years, she has avenged thousands of victims and their families, not just with compassion, but, more importantly, by doing her job so diligently that justice unquestionably is done.

One of those victims wrote to me recently to explain what Cunneen meant to him: “Some 20 years back Margaret prosecuted more than 25 charges of sexual abuse against three separate individuals; I was one of some twelve or fifteen victims involved in these cases. Long story short, Ms Cunneen was successful in achieving convictions in regard to all three perpetrators.

“Had it not been for Margaret’s compassion, understanding and genuine support, many of the victims would not have had the confidence to appear as witnesses.

“The bumbling fools at ICAC should be held accountable for their unsupported attack on one of this state’s most professional public servants.

“I believe Margaret is owed an unconditional apology from the incompetent, tax-payer funded ICAC. Resignations and compensation would also be appropriate.”

Cunneen’s reputation is not vulnerable to legal vendettas or the whispering campaigns of frenemies. It rests on the opinion of the thousands of victims she has helped, and their families and friends. That’s why ICAC is in trouble.

Miranda Devine
–,
Wednesday,
July,
29,
2015,(5:10am)

Do the geniuses who run AFL actually think they can command a crowd not to boo Adam Goodes? Next they’ll try walking on water.

No, nothing can be done to force people to like Goodes. Only he can change people’s perceptions of him.

A good start would be for the Swans star to apologise to the 13-year-old girl he singled out for rough treatment during a Collingwood game two years ago, after she shouted: “You’re an ape”.

Goodes understandably was upset at what he took as a racist slur. But as soon as he got close to the girl he should have seen she was a child and let it go.

The Collingwood fan was barely 13 - the daughter of a single mother on a disability pension, from a hard-scrabble town in Gippsland. She told me later through her mother she didn’t even know “ape” was racist. She was just sledging the opposition.

Despite her youth, Goodes was determined to make an example of her. He kept pointing until stadium officials took her away. The crying girl was paraded through the jeering crowd, and detained by stadium police past midnight, while her worried grandmother and little sisters were told to stay in their seats.

When she finally was released, Nana had to drive three hours home, with no offer of help.

“Racism had a face - and it was a 13-year-old girl,” Goodes said.

He had the grace later to accept her written apology, but the damage had been done.

He should have apologised to her a long time ago, but better late than never. At least he would show that he now understands what he did was wrong, unfair, and did nothing to combat racism.

He was a rich, powerful, 33-year-old elite sportsman; she was a defenseless, underprivileged child. And the AFL, if it cared about him, would have told him so, rather than pandering to his misplaced sense of victimhood.

Instead Goodes was hailed a hero for “calling out” racism, and made Australian of the Year where he kept telling Australians they are racist.

This is the root of the crowd antipathy to Goodes. It has nothing to do with the colour of his skin. It comes down to his “dobbing and sooking” after a little girl called him a rude name, as former player Karl Langdon put it this week.

Short of banning the fans, there’s not much the AFL can do about this vicious cycle, other than to counsel Goodes to remake his image. Enlisting other players to incite the crowd on his behalf will only make things worse.

Goodes is upset by the heckling and says he would be “really disappointed” if his career ended on a negative note.

Well, that’s in your hands, Adam. Apologise to the girl, and recognise that Australians don’t take kindly to being accused of being racists when they are not.

Miranda Devine
–,
Tuesday,
June,
30,
2015,(6:22am)

The decision by the ABC to close ranks and deploy its resources to defend the indefensible on Monday night only seals its fate in the mind of the public. No contrition, no apology, no remedial action. Just defiance, diversion, and attack.

Something is rotten in the ABC.

Henry Ergas explains:

Merely hours after the managing director of the ABC claimed Zaky Mallah had the same right to ­appear on Q&A as Charlie Hebdo had to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, the Islamists showed the world exactly how much use they have for freedom of expression.

The 54-year-old chief executive whose severed head was placed on the fence of an American-owned factory in France; the 38 people, mostly Western tourists, who were butchered at Sousse in Tunisia; the 25 others who lost their lives in a suicide attack on one of the largest Shia mosques in Kuwait City: they won’t have the chance to debate whether Muslim extremists should be given a platform. But the jihadists’ apologists will. And if Mark Scott has his way, they will do so at Australian ­taxpayers’ expense.

Not that taxpayers have any choice; unlike the “News Ltd tabloids” Scott accused of not “pursuing a rational discourse”, we are all forced to pay the ABC’s costs. As to what it does with those funds, that, Scott maintains, is a matter for the ABC and it alone: anything else, he said last Thursday in a speech to the Centre for Corporate Public Affairs, would make us no different from “North Korea and Russia, China and Vietnam”.

Miranda Devine
–,
Saturday,
June,
27,
2015,(11:59pm)

WHEN the ABC’s Q&A program aired a Thursday night special on same sex marriage a week ago, it included just one panellist who supported traditional marriage.

Christian Democrats Leader Fred Nile, 80, the sole heterosexual on the panel, was outnumbered six to one. He did a valiant job, but it was no contest against such odds. The show was an hour of blatant taxpayer-funded propaganda, with Nile as its neutered fig leaf.

This is the way Q&A works. A pure creature of the ABC culture, it relentlessly promotes leftist-Green causes, while slyly pretending to offer open debate and freedom of expression.

Its influence is pernicious.

Whether it’s same sex marriage, climate change, asylum seekers, reconciliation, or national security, on all the touchstone issues of the left, the ABC culture always favours enemies of the West, atheists, climate alarmists, radical feminists, Marxists, and any trendy cause which undermines the middle class Judeo-Christian morality which underpins Australia.

There is no balance, unless you count a handful of pet conservatives tolerated because they are progressive on social issues, or useful because they might damage Tony Abbott.

Otherwise, the conservative viewpoint is represented by some poor sap set up as a hated gargoyle, ridiculed by audience and host alike.

The best you can hope for from the ABC is the occasional straight bat, but never on Q&A, which is simply the most overt expression of the debased, oddly elitist culture which taxpayers fund to the tune of more than $1billion a year.

Against the backdrop of last week’s Zaky Mallah furore, Fred Nile’s experience is instructive.

In the weeks leading up to Q&A’s “Between a Frock and a Hard Place” special, Nile’s media advisor Neveen Pavlatos says she raised concerns several times to the show’s producers about what was shaping up to be a “skewed panel”. To no avail.

On the night of the show, she says two producers, Amanda Collinge and Christine El Khouri, refused to allow Nile’s guests to join the audience, claiming it was Q&A policy not to allow staffers and volunteers of panelists.

Yet, says Pavlatos, it was obvious that at least two audience members with pre-approved questions were associated with other panelists, because they joined them in the Green Room for drinks and canapés after the show.

“Not only was the Rev out numbered on the panel and the audience ridiculously skewed, but to also restrict our guests taking part in the audience was pathetically unprofessional and unacceptable,” an angry Pavlatos told me last week.

(I had a similar experience the last time I appeared on Q&A, when two journalist friends I had invited for moral support were banned from the audience, until I kicked up a stink.)

Yes, the Q&A audience is as cunningly curated to favour the “progressive” side of the argument as everything else about the show.

The bogus statistics flashed on the screen, for instance, claiming the audience is evenly balanced between Coalition and Labor/Green voters, are just a sick inside joke.

No half-conservative audience would have applauded Mallah when he appeared on the show last week, with a scripted question attacking the government’s efforts to strip citizenship from dual national jihadist fighters.

Just six months after the Lindt Café siege, Q&A saw fit to invite an unstable convicted criminal and known terrorist sympathiser into its audience to confront the Foreign Minister’s parliamentary secretary Steve Ciobo.

Mallah supports al-Qaeda backed terrorist groups, and has returned from the Syrian frontline, where he claims he didn’t fight. He has been convicted of threatening to kidnap and kill an ASIO officer, and acquitted of two counts of planning a terrorist attack on a government building using a gun and hostages.

He was arrested in 2003 after police searching his home found a Sterling .22 rifle and ammunition he had recently purchased, a handwritten will and a document titled “How can I prepare myself for Jihad”.

In the years since, he has made sexually violent and obscene public statements on Twitter and YouTube about me and another News Corp colleague.

And yet, the ABC’s Managing Director Mark Scott last week defended Q&A’s appalling judgement on free speech grounds. The only mistake was that Mallah’s comments were aired live.

In an embarrassing speech on Thursday, Scott invoked Voltaire and Martin Luther King and, obscenely, the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Is he stupid, ignorant, or just arrogant?

Q&A’s problem has nothing to do with free speech. Mallah is free to express his repellent views whenever he likes, and has done so frequently on social media, and in interviews.

The problem is that Q&A chose to elevate his status, promote his views and encourage his delusions by providing him a live television platform from which to harangue a federal government minister and pose as a victim. Predictably, he used that platform to justify Islamic State recruitment of Australians.

Miranda Devine
–,
Wednesday,
June,
17,
2015,(9:13am)

WHO cares whether impoverished Indonesian crew were paid a few bucks to turn around asylum boats and take their human cargo back to Indonesia. That was a boatload of unhappy customers they were disgorging to badmouth the people smuggler’s business.

One way or the other, the boats are stopped. That’s what the Abbott government promised before the last election. That’s what they delivered.

And that’s what most Australians wanted. They wanted to stop the drownings. They wanted to stop the uncontrolled flood of unverified asylum seekers on illegal boats. They wanted to stop the people smugglers who took our country for an $11 billion ride during six years of Labor incompetence.

But there is a small cadre of smug, self-serving hypocrites, who I like to call “compassionistas”, the type you see in Q & A audiences and all too often on its panels, who are dismayed that the boats have stopped.

It’s ruined their narrative, you see.

For so long they pretended it was impossible to stop the boats. They claimed the boats were being “pushed” here by events outside our control, not “pulled” by slack government policy pandering to the extreme left.

Yes, the boats are stopped. But the very people who got us into the mess are hell-bent on destroying the Abbott government’s greatest triumph because it shows them in such a bad light.

So they are busy rewriting history, to try to turn success into failure and perhaps to goad Indonesia into ending its cooperation with Australia.

Exhibit one: Greens Senator Sarah “accidents happen” Hanson-Young. Back in 2012, she was full of compassion for asylum boat crews locked up under mandatory sentencing laws enacted by a desperate Gillard government.

She called them “poor Indonesian fishermen” who were “simply tricked on board an asylum seeker boat, to cook noodles or to help with the steering.”

But last week she was talking on the other side of her face. Now Hanson-Young holds angry doorstops denouncing the Abbott government for allegedly paying $30,000 to those very same “poor Indonesian fisherman” to take their boats back to Indonesia.

This is such a massive crime that the Greens and Labor have referred the government to the AFP, and the ABC and Fairfax are in a lather of indignation.

Of course, now that Labor has questions of its own to answer over apparent payments to people-smugglers when it was in office, the wind has gone out of this despicable gotcha game.

But it has been wondrous to behold the chutzpah of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, his Immigration spokesman Richard Marles and the former minister Tony Burke, lambasting the government for allegedly “paying people smugglers” to stop the boats. There they were, staking out the moral high ground, when they must have known the nuances of Labor’s failure ever to get a lid on the problem.

From the minute Kevin Rudd wimped it with the Oceanic Viking, and sent the signal to people smugglers that the mugs were back in charge, boats became the enduring symbol of his government’s ineptitude.

Instead of taking responsibility for the consequences of its false compassion, and learning the unyielding electoral lesson, all Shorten’s Labor Party has left is a vain bid to save face.

In this, they are ably assisted by the Greens, the refugee industry, and those in the media who urged Labor to dismantle the Howard-era border protection.

Any opportunity the compassionistas have to discredit the Abbott-Morrison success they jump at like hyenas ripping at a carcass, whether it’s the death of an asylum seeker during a violent riot at Manus Island, the spurious claim that our Navy tortured asylum seekers, or talk of shady payments to boat crews.

That’s why Gillian Triggs, the president of the Human Rights Commission, is their darling. She ignored the suffering of children in detention through the years when the Labor Party which appointed her were in charge. She saw no evil when there were 1992 children piled into overcrowded detention centres. Only when the Abbott government had released most of the children did Triggs start bellyaching.

And on Monday night, on the ABC’s Q & A program, she actually had the hide smugly to insinuate that it was only because she raised the alarm that children were released from detention.

Lawyers are our new high priests and priestesses, and Q & A on Monday night was their altar. But with Triggs it was as if a deity had descended.

Tiger host Tony Jones turned into a pussy cat in her presence. It was left to plucky Brownyn Bishop to point out the home truth to Triggs that withholding her criticism until after Labor left office “has made you a very political figure and therefore you are subject to criticism.”

No criticism from the Canberra audience, which erupted into rapturous applause at Triggs’ every immortal utterance.

With Bishop, it was more a behind-the-sheds experience than a heavenly visitation, as the whole panel ganged against her.

Some were more subtle than others but, as in any schoolyard, it is the ones who try too hard to join the in-crowd who give the game away.